Clobberin' Time

I attempt to be a good person and not assume that people conform to demeaning stereotypes. I try to keep an open mind.

And yet, there is a certain amount of truth to the idea that the kind of people who work in hobby stores tend to be the kind of people who love their hobby and hate their customers. The Simpsons' Comic Book Guy and Jack Black's character in High Fidelity are perhaps the archetype of this stereotype (is that possible? Can you be two kinds of type?), but if you've ever ventured into a sports store or a knitting store, you've met these kind of people too.

And yet there is the occasional kind and helpful clerk at any of these stores--they're not all obese misanthropes.

Indeed, so it is at my regular comic book store, where the clerks do conform to some stereotypes (a certain level of geekiness, a few extra pounds) and shatter others (one of them is female, and all have been kind and helpful to me and my children whenever we've gone in there.) (And yeah, I have a regular comic book store, as well as a spouse and a life, so I suppose I'm shattering some stereotypes myself.)

And so, the other day, I found myself in a different, and rather glorious comic book store in a different part of town. It was expansive rather than cramped, and the boy and I strolled the aisles for quite a long time taking in the huge selection of trade paperbacks, manga (which I still don't really get), and regular ol' comic books before one of us got sick of it and demanded to leave. The boy posed a question to the clerk, and he replied in a kind and knowledgeable fashion, and I thought, well, this is a heck of a place.

But then, as we're leaving, the boy grabs a couple of the free postcards sitting out for anyone to take on the counter. And the guy wigs out because one of the cards was a pass to a screening of The Love Guru and he thought we'd taken two, when in fact we hadn't. This when the cards are sitting on the counter and, by the way, we'd just dropped a substantial hunk of change in his store.

"That guy's a freak," the boy said as we exited the store. It was a perfectly-timed maneuver where he was speaking loud enough that the guy could hear him, but not so loud that it looked like he wanted him to hear. Also the door was still wide open and closed right after the word "freak" escaped the boy's lips.

Normally I would upbraid the boy for his rudeness, but, in this case, all I could do was nod in assent. We kept walking, never to return.